You know, People That Rule Us, you can't all be America's Dumbest Legislator. And this isn't a contest.
The Republican Senate candidate in West Virginia says she misspoke during a Tuesday night debate when she said she didn’t believe in climate change, and is pointing to the rain as evidence that conditions are shifting “all the time.”
“Is the climate changing? Yes, it’s changing, it changes all the time, we heard it raining out there,” Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told reporters. “I’m sure humans are contributing to it.”
Wait,
what?
But speaking with reporters afterward, she said she misspoke, and referred to the weather in Charleston, W.Va., to demonstrate her point, according to The Charleston Gazette.
It is unclear whether Capito meant that human activity causes weather events such as rain.
It is indeed unclear. You could suppose that she "misspoke" and said climate when she meant weather, but her answer would remain similarly indecipherable. Does she suppose humans contribute to rain, but not climate? Does she suppose the climate shifts like rainfall does, when the two things are really not at all alike except in that both will at some point get you wet? Did she copy her answer from a YouTube comment thread? It remains a mystery. We could ask her, but that would run the risk of having to hear her talk again.
It's very easy to tell when a politician is giving a rote answer because their politics demand they believe a certain thing regardless of the evidence. It's easy because their responses are shallow, and repetitive, and frequently flubbed or botched. Caputo is required to believe that all of the world's scientists are not as clever as some so-and-so who supposes that changing the very composition of the planet's atmosphere is no big deal because sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn't, whatchagonnado, so that's what she believes. Her staff is probably hard at work on her next "explanation" of what she meant by the "it's raining" quip, and unless they force her to read it verbatim she'll probably botch that one too.
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